Jim's book was presented at Athy this year; he gave a very well-done talk on the subject. Shackleton was well known for his love and knowledge of poetry so this book is a welcomed addition to the Shackleton canon.

"Sir Ernest Shackleton, known as a tough polar explorer and inspirational leader, also held the words of poets close to his heart. 'Poetry was his other world and he explored it as eagerly as he did the great Antarctic spaces,' said his friend, Mrs. Hope Guthrie. This new biography reveals another side of Shackleton's story through the poetry he loved. It also includes–for the first time in published form—all the poems and poetic diary extracts written by the great explorer, each of which sheds light on significant milestones in his life and adventures. Shackleton, who did more than any other explorer to open Antarctica to the popular imagination, used poetry as a tool, to encourage and motivate men who were frequently operating close to their physical and psychological limits. The works of Tennyson, Browning and Robert W. Service were, in his own phrase, 'vital mental medicine' throughout his life. Poems influenced his speeches, his letters to his wife and the way he led his men. These verses, selected from his correspondence and other sources, are linked throughout the book to Shackleton's turbulent and restless life, offering fresh insights into his struggles in the Antarctic, his strained but loving marriage and the magnetic attraction of the polar regions. Shackleton: A life in Poetry is a love story, a new interpretation of a well-known Boy's Own adventure and a poetic exploration.

Jim Mayer is an expedition leader and a guide in the Arctic and Antarctic where he specialises in polar history. He has led his own life of exploration, having skied across the Greenland ice cap and survived an attack from hungry polar bears."Source: From the publisher's website.

As if remembering that his eyes once filled
with snow, his expression's vague and ill
at ease to find himself in this watered down space
beside a sluggish stream. Set up

in this city workers' lunchtime chatter place, he extends
one hopeful arm: like shop assistants, clerks,
like my father at his office window opposite, he's
impatient to leave, reluctant to go home.

* * * *
A land then too young for heroes (Everest
had not been climbed) claimed its share of Empire's Glory
where it could, though for Scott, Christchurch was merely
harbour, somewhere for passing through.

No air. All petty scandal. Nothing more.
wrote Kathleen Scott, explorer's wife and sculptor,
of this faux English town. The couple moved from host
to host, the last no better than the first.

* * * *
A bamboo pole poked through fresh snow. Seeing this,
the searchers guessed what they might find, stayed long enough
inside the dug-out tent to know. Built a cairn. Stood apart
in silence and in prayer under a blazing midnight sky.

Scott had starved to death. He might, the searchers thought,
have been the first to die. He'd flung one frozen arm
across his comrade, Wilson, left a letter
to Kathleen, marked To my widow, by his side.

* * * *
Bronze, as the Greeks knew, was the metal fit for heroes
but in 1915 was all used up for armaments.
Kathleen chose instead Carrara marble - fragile,
as the Greeks knew too. So she shipped it incomplete,

especially his hands, his arm which pointed north
towards the home he never reached; Kathleen planned
to travel south again to finish it but never did.
She stayed in England, married a one-armed baronet (war hero),
danced often at the Savoy. And chose her epitaph:Kathleen: The happiest woman alive.

1. His voyage begins with a dream which, "because sailors are superstitious men", sends him to New Burlington Street, where he finds the office of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, 1914.

2. He travels into the country of his dream.

3. He meditates on the nine Emperor penguins which, on the day the Endurance was destroyed by the pack-ice, appeared from a crack in the ice and uttered wailing cries, "quite unlike any we had heard before", that sounded like a dirge for the ship.

4. He watches the men on Elephant Island after their six months' drift on an ice-floe.

5. He hears Crean singing at the tiller of the James Caird, when, with the singer, Shackleton, and three other men, he is voyaging in the ship's boat to South Georgia to bring help to the men on Elephant Island.

6. He hears, as the sixteen days' voyage progresses, the undersong of that "flat, dreary but somehow heartening tune".

7. He watches Shackleton.

8. He looks at a sick man.

9. They find and lose South Georgia.

10. Worsley in the hurricane.

11. He hears the sick man.

12. He sees the end of the boat journey.

13. The landing.

14. Worsley, with Shackleton and Crean, the sick men left in King Haakon Sound, climbs the mountains of South Georgia to cross to the whaling station at Stromness Bay.

15. They have the impression that a fourth man is travelling with them.